Gene and Stem Cell Therapies to Reconstruct Injured Bones

A group of investigators from Cedars-Sinai has successfully treated serious limb fractures in the animals in their laboratory using a state-of-the-art procedure that prompts the bone to regrow over its own tissue. If discovered to be effective and safe for humans, this groundbreaking process of merging ultrasound, gene and stem cell therapies could ultimately replace grafting as a method to repair seriously broken bones.

The co-director of the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute and Skeletal Regeneration and Stem Cell Therapy Program in the Department of Surgery named Dan Gazit, PhD, DMD said that they are just at the start of an advancement in orthopedics. They’re uniting an engineering method with a biological method to advance regenerative engineering, which they consider as the future of medicine.

You see, over a couple million bone grafts are done around the world every year. Those who have serious injuries that got involved in a tumor removal, traffic accident or war often need these. Said injuries can produce gaps between the fracture’s edges that are too big for the bone to link on its own. These grafts need pieces of the implants from the bone either of the donor or of the patient into the gap.

The problem with bone grafts is that they bring shortcomings as there are still significant unmet requirements in skeleton restoration. Fortunately, the new method that the Cedars-Sinai team developed could offer the much-needed option other than bone grafts.

The co-senior author and assistant professor of Surgery at Cedars-Sinai named Gadi Pelled, PhD, DMD revealed that their experiments displayed that the bone growing in the gap was as sturdy as those formed by surgical bone grafts. Their research is the very first to showcase that the delivery of an ultrasound-facilitated gene to the stem cells of an animal can be successfully used to attend to the bone fractures that don’t heal. Pelled said that it will help address a crucial unmet need in orthopedics and provides new potentials for clinical translation.